Thu, 19 May 2005

Seth
First I gotta explain that was the same summer my uncle Jeb took a header off the nature trail bridge and sealed his fate. Jeb used to take me and Jay-Jay and Josef and Seth, back before he became the monk of everclear, but I’m gettin’ to that, anyway he used to take us all out fishin’ on the cedar, which is a shitty place to fish cause all you’re bound to catch is bullheads and carp and maybe a catfish. All the fish in the cedar are ugly. The upside to this is you rarely get a bite, so if you’ve got a mind to do some drinkin’, just drop a line and by the time you got one on you’ve worked up a sweet buzz, unless you were my uncle Jeb who was always an i’m-sober-i’m-sober-i’m-fuckin’-ripped kinda drinker but this shit is all incidental. Jeb used to pour a little in the water, watch it was down towards Gilbertville, tell us he’s getting the river drunk so we can catch more fish. Actually when I say it like that he kinda sounds like a dirtbag, I’m doing this all wrong but he was a good guy, even with his problems, and we all had problems, specially that fucked-up worthless summer. He was out by himself nightfishin and talking to the cedar (which if you’re from around here is shits and giggles; what do you say to a wall of black sludge?) and the river tells him it’s not really the river talkin’ it’s Rick Hannah, that little eight-year old from cedar terrace who drowned a year or so ago, only Rick’s about to get out of the river and go to heaven (he had to work off some bad karma, I remember, he was a creepy kid, and ants-and-magnifying-glass kinda kid, which is a bad thing to say about the dead when they died little but anyway) which meant someone was gonna take his place. Jeb chewed on that a while and got scared, thinking it was him, but Rick told him it wasn’t gonna be him, some drunk high-school kids were gonna eat it in a few days. So Jeb got all paranoid and wouldn’t leave the river ‘cept for more booze and microwave burritos from the evansdale Guns-N-Likker, and a few days of this and he was in a bad way by Friday, when me and the hoolies went out to drink cheep beer (“Pig’s eye ICE? what the fuck?”) and commiserate about our third collective month of girlfriendlessness. Jeb, though, he was squirrely and staggering and had tears in his eyes, so we checked if he was okay — Jeb kinda had a rough stretch back in ‘87, spent a couple months at the MHI in independence, but that’s another story — and then we went rock-n-bowling. While we were being bludgeoned by 120 db of Ozzy and getting rejected by girls with feathered hair Jeb went to a pay phone, called my dad and told him what all was going on and that he was sorry, then went back out on the bridge and jumped. It’s not a tall bridge, but the cedar’s pretty shallow. Later that night, some kids form cedar falls nearly went off the main St. bridge, but the guardrail held.

Now there’s two ways to take that: the way most people do is Jeb’s kinda a hero for what he did, but my dad and I (and the hoolies) see it different, Jeb got suckered, or maybe he just wanted to die anyway. We hung out a lot, but I don’t know enough to speculate like that. My dad told me a story about Jeb, after the funeral. When Jebbie (what my dad called him) was in kindergarten, he thought the weatherman makes the weather, and decided he was going to learn how to be a weather wizard and know enough nobody would have to go to school ever again. He made himself a magic wand out of a twig, put on my grandad’s sports coat and tie, and wearing nothing but that and a pair of moon boots climbed up on top of the car and started yelling ‘SNOW! SNOW! SNOOOOOOW!’, and before long, it actually started snowing. This wasn’t any mean fear in February, but my dad and his sisters and their folks used to laugh about that, blaming Jeb every time it snowed, even when they were older. That was the first time I saw my dad cry.

Anyway, the point of all that is it became a thing with the hoolies to go out to the nature trail bridge and drink and look for Jeb’s ghost. It was kinda solemn for a few weeks, but it got back into the swing of things once summer started in full, and once jay-jay got a girlfriend who had girlfriends, it was looking like it was gonna be a good summer, but that all got shot to hell when Seth had his brush with the dharma.

We were elevating our taste in hooch from bad beer to bad liquor, and being kids, we developed a taste for everclear. Seth had a thing for it, though, the rest of us were all lightweight but he was workin’ on it, wanted to learn how to drink for college. Seth was a year younger than me, and I told him he’d have plenty of time for all that after he flunked out like me, but you just can’t talk to that boy sometimes.

For example, it must have been the end of June, and the hoolies had decided it was time to learn the fine art of mixing drinks and were working on new recipes at jay-jay’s girlfriend’s apartment when Seth, halfway through that night’s bottle, took a spill on the stairs and fell five flights (not all at once, mind, he went from six to four, then got up and went down to three, then nearly made it up to the fourth landing when he rolled all the way down to two, giving up on fighting gravity) and laid there in a puddle of sick until we found him, probably an hour later. Booze chemistry nite was called off and we drove Seth home, dumping him off on his parent’s front steps and heading for the hills.

Next morning I got a call from Seth’s mom, who I used to think had a thing for me but now chalk that up to the foolish hubris of youth, who sounded panicky, which (and this shows what a dork I was) gave me the chance to play Mr. level-headed hero. sheeesh.

Soon as I came in Seth gave me a massive bear hug, which isn’t a Seth thing to do, and just starts in on this new kick he’s on.

“‘Ay! How you been, man? I’ve been weird, it’s like, it’s kinda hard to explain, uh, coulda shut the door…okay, it’s like this. I know this is gonna sound psycho, but that’s how it is, like, I think something happened to me. Like I don’t think I’m all me, it’s like there’s a little bit of someone else in me now, and I’ve been seeing things all different. I think things are changing, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, I don’t really, I haven’t thought it all the way out yet. Y’know?”

“Uh, no, no Seth. You okay?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’m good, I’m…I’m really good. I’ve just been thinking about a lot of things, laying in bed all day, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s time I started doing things a bit different.”

“You know your mom called me up and told me you were actin’ like a nut.”

“Yeah, earlier I hadn’t really thought before I opened my mouth and was kinda thinking out loud and tat was stupid, I admit that, but I’m kinda past that, I’m getting used to it, whatever that is.”

And none of this seemed all that weird, I mean god knows I had weirder talk after Jeb died and Jay-Jay once told us some crazy stuff about, well naw, I better not talk about that.

Anyway, I left there after consoling Seth’s mom (heh) and things seemed back to normal until that next Friday, when Seth began making his proclamations.

“Okay, first off, I’m not gonna lie anymore. I’ve been thinking about trust and how you can’t trust people if you lie to them and so all the people I love, for starters, I’m not gonna lie to, and after I get the hang of it then no more lies at all, period.”

Now I best explain that none of the hoolies talked about love like that, like maybe if you with your girlfriend and the situation fit you’d say that, but even in our drunkest moments we never said we, like, loved each other. It just wasn’t like that, and it wasn’t like a gay thing either, so this was weird, and the lie thing topped it. Seth lies like it’s a mental condition and it’s just something you get used to, like if he says he’s coming over you don’t expect it, if he shows cool, if not no big surprise. And he always makes shit up, but that’s not really a lie, that’s embellishment, and we all do our share of that. However, he was pretty deep into his bottle, and one is given to proclamations at that point.

“Yeah!” said Jay-Jay. “I vow never to mix wine and whiskey ever again!”

“I vow, uh, shit,” stammered Josef. “Get back to me in a sec.”

I leaped in with “all those books on my shelf I keep on there just to impress people? I’m gonna read all of em, every last one.”

Josef had a weird look in his eye for a minute, he was really trying to answer this, and finally he sighed and said “I don’t know. When I think of something, I’ll let you know.”

Seth laughed along with us, and we dropped the subject for the evening. That was the last time we were able to do so.

Next time I saw Seth he had developed his vague epiphany into a system. “Okay, it’s two parts. One, I can’t tell any more lies, because I need people to be able to trust me. Two, until I figure out what to do with myself, and I need to do something soon, this dicking around is getting old, I’ll do the things that will make the people who love me proud, because maybe through that I’ll be able to figure out what I want, and until I do that I don’t think I’m gonna be okay.”

I almost asked him what he meant by okay, but I kinda understood. We were all floating, then, in some drift we didn’t understand, waiting for something to happen to us. Out here it’s always been like that, you drift or do army or go straight to work, which is what you’re gonna do eventually anyway, it’s just how long you can put it off. Seth was probably gonna go straight off after college, if he got through, which he might. He was smart enough, but he was a fuckup, just like the rest of us. Well, Josef, only partway a fuckup, Jay-Jay’s a complete fuckup, and well, I guess I’m one too, really. I pretend I’m not sometimes, but really, yeah. So Seth’s epiphany was kinda harder for us to take than we’d care to admit, because Seth was basically trying to say he wasn’t going to be a fuckup anymore, and that just wasn’t an option. Here, let me show you.

For the next month or so Seth drank with us but he was getting to be a quiet drunk, staring into the water. While we all cracked wise and pretended things hadn’t changed. Jay-Jay had to explain to his girlfriend and her friends why Seth was so quiet, but I don’t think they understood. It was hard to explain, it still is. So we were wandering around the mall, playing t-mek and waiting for the nine o’clock showing of pink flamingoes, and Seth looked over at bouncy little kid in a parka and pj’s and she looked at him and said “hiiiiiii!” and Seth just lost it. He couldn’t stop crying, I mean, it was like a scene, I had to take him outside and ask him what was wrong, and he couldn’t explain, he didn’t understand. All kinds of things like that started happening, things that were just like nothing started to depress the hell out of him. And he was having a hell of a time figuring out what the people he cared about wanted from him, what would make them proud. Everybody he asked, pretty much, they just told him they wanted him to be happy, but he didn’t know how to be happy. And it kept getting worse.

Soon Seth stopped hanging out, just bummed around his room, listening to old jazz records and staring at his hands and sleeping. I stopped over a few times, tried to get him out of the house, but there was no way he was gonna leave his room.

“I think maybe when I fell, that maybe my soul left my body and got mixed up with some other souls, and part of them is still with me, but I lost parts of me in the swap, and maybe those parts I still needed.”

“Maybe, Seth. I don’t know.”

“I’m never gonna be okay, am I?”

And I think about it now, and I realize I should have told him yes, things are going to get better Seth, you just have to give things time, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew then was don’t worry about it, and that’s what I told him.

A month or so later his parents sent him off to Richter-Goldberg, and I didn’t see him for a long time, and when I did things were different and we don’t talk much anymore. And it seems like there’s something in there, and maybe if I could figure it out everything would be okay, but I don’t know. I don’t understand it at all, and I think shit just happens and there’s no way really to make sense of it, we try and make up excuses but at the end of the day who knows. It’s like trying to figure out all that stuff about Jeb don’t lead to anything and you just go insane trying to make sense of it ‘cause you’re never gonna do it, or it’s like those books on my shelf I never read, I tried to read some of ‘em but it was all shit about other people and other things and I can’t make that jump from here to there. This probably sounds really stupid.

Anyway, that’s what happened to Seth.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #